Previous Post Wow. I've been underwhelmed by this run so far, but this one really worked for me. The detail and sense of scale was really impressive. I still think that there's a sort of "dead eyed" look to Hitch's characters, they don't seem to come alive, but some of the panels were hugely impressive. Didn't like Johnny talking about "fat chicks", hardly humanitarian... did like his "third worst break up" line though. Who's the guy in the final panel? And considering that Hitch designed the new TARDIS, then is the Taxi saying "Dallek" a coincidence? www.fantasticfourheadquarters.com

Because this is the first issue where the Millarisms have entirely taken over the plot and characterization. It feels tired to me, and Millar increasingly seems less like writer with pet themes than a writer with a stock set of ideas that turn up in every title. (Warren Ellis gets like this too these days; his best comics in recent years have been the ones he's not taking all that seriously, like Nextwave and Thunderbolts. Then wild absurdity and plain fun rule the day, and the work is oddly more engaging for it.)

This is the issue in which Millar's Johnny Storm descends fully into uselessness; it's simply an utter mystery why anyone would ever have put up with him as he's portrayed here. Already callow and narcissistic enough to sleep with a superpowered bank robber, here he's reduced to a boilerplate line about moving battles away from civilians and promptly fed to Millar's big new threat (more on which later). It's not so different than his "superpeople as cynical celebrity fantasy" riffs in The Authority (and their evil counterparts in his final arc), The Ultimates, and, even stuff like Chosen and Wanted (albeit slightly skewed in each). Paris Hilton sucks. 2008 seems a bit past the sell-by date for that bit of stunning satire; I'm fairly sure most of her original appeal was a kitschy understanding of just exactly how crap she is.

Via Alyssa Moy, we get his now-inevitable military-industrial complex conspiracy, the same one that provided the threats in The Authority, was a target of satire in The Ultimates, was being run behind-the-scenes by the supervillains in Wanted, was unveiled as the background of many of Marvel's supervillains in Marvel Knights Spider-Man, and made up his take on the Sentinels and Weapon Plus in Ultimate X-Men. I can buy shortsighted greedheads as threats, and I can even buy the occasional megalomaniac. I can't really buy this endless use of a secret world order of elites who are somehow venal and stupid at the same time they're organized and efficient enough to keep the (super)people down and eat the future for breakfast.

It just about worked in the Authority, where it was played for laughs. The Ultimate Universe was founded on it, and Ultimate Fury had enough nuance to be more than a strawman under Millar and Bendis. It was strained in Wanted, where even the manques of DC supervillains and cheerfully nihilistic humor of the miniseries didn't amount to substance in the end. But in his "mainstream" Marvel work, we're getting vague allusions to unseen conspirators, that is, major plot developments built on faceless non-characters and clodhoppingly reductive pseudopolitical screeds disguised as shocking expository revelations. Alyssa may as well be reading Mac Gargan's lines from MKSM in that subplot cutaway. I get it already. Mark Millar doesn't like the system, or is at least ambiguous towards it. But you don't seem to have much to say on the matter, and you keep saying it in increasingly less interesting (and, frankly, less plausible and accurate) ways.

And now, with the tie-in to "Old Man Logan" over in Wolverine, we have the dystopian world of rotten posthumans running everything in existence while the heroes have either fallen to the Secret Society of Super-Villains or are ruined, corrupted shells of themselves. I get it: the New Defenders are all versions of classic Marvel heroes. I see a Colossus stand-in, a Rachel Summers wannabe, and Natalie (Professoress?) X. Oh, yes, and Mark's bog-standard "dammit, the Hulk is a bastard and a monster" idea. The big Doctor Doom story is so far an exercise in patented Doom Dialogue and the plot of Wanted.

Ah, yes, and for the second time in as many arcs, the idea of something that can take down Galactus is the summa cum laude of power demonstration. Reed can build a giant super-robot to beat Galactus and use it to beat, er, another super-robot (a plot detail set up in Millar's first Wolverine run, as it were). Now the smart Hulk seems to have done it. We might at least see a different Marvel Cosmic being used. Why not the Watcher in chains (I suppose he's too busy being punched by the Red Hulk this month), or a Celestial (perhaps X-Men and Eternals have dibs)?

Now, I can see why the power-level shorthand of taking out Galactus is an attractive one, especially on this book. He's got visual scale -- a friggin' cosmic giant, as the Human Hilton might say. And he's an FF character. But this is twice in a very short timespan. With Arc I being but 4 issues long, this may even end up in the same TPB as Reed's anti-giant-giant. He's turned the volume up to 11 in his first four issues, and now the speakers are starting to buzz alarmingly and hisses and pops are creeping in. (That run-on sentence was my tribute to Mark's dialogue style.)

But the biggest problem, the one I never expected to see from the guy who wrote those issues of Authority -- whatever my other problems with them -- and Civil War, is the passivity of the leads. We're not seeing stories about the FF as omni-explorers, at least not after those promising first few pages of this creative run. We're seeing the FF as simple, reactive superheroes (who happen to have a team idiot who reacts a bit slowly even for this genre.) Reed isn't the one constructing Earth: The Sequel; that's Alyssa Moy. Reed's role in that arc was to react to the big reveal, then react to the threat of the omnipowered Cap (aka Seth in Millar's Authority, aka ), and finally beat him by unveiling...a big robot built to react to Galactus's occasional stops at Salad Bar Terra. (Why bother now that you know there's a spare out there?) And this arc is headed in the direction of "the FF react to the threat of evil dystopian superhumans kidnapping Johnny Oh Noes (and Doom, too, not that his single line of dialogue in this issue would draw your attention to his presence)!"

And the worst of it is, this is the second promising setup Mark's blown. That makes one per arc. Earth II: Electric Boogaloo had all sorts of possibilities and wonders built into it, but first it was a setup for Killer Robot Story #888,427, and now it's descending rapidly into a setup for a slightly less developed version of "something's rotten at Roxxon Oil." Now we've got Bendis handing Millar an intriguing idea -- Dr. Doom in front of the World Court, with the FF perhaps trying to work out what their stance is on the matter and running into the ever-present question of superhero interventionism and so forth -- which Mark has jettisoned for a crossover involving a dystopian future and Doom relegated to "feed the bigger new threat" status.

Nor has the one plot resolution we've seen been all that interesting. Lee and Kirby (or just Kirby, mayhaps) had the FF driving off Galactus thanks to Johnny braving time and space to retrieve a universe-erasing cigarette lighter from a planet-sized spaceship, and a seemingly omnipotent Doctor Doom being decoyed away by a super-weapon towards a rendezvous with "lines mortals were never meant to cross." Byrne provided a tale of defeating a planet-ravaging titan (a brand-new one, mind you) using a softball-sized gizmo and the Earth's angular momentum, and a Negative Zone starship powered by pirated super-minds and a phony religious cult being undone by Reed Richards remote-piloting both it and his own body and stopping Annihilus in the bargain.

Mark's big idea for Reed? Having Bryan Hitch update an episode of Ultraman so we can see one big robot punch another one. For Millar, the way to beat Galactus is to make a tougher Galactus-sized, Galactus-shaped weapon. (In the same way, the way to beat monsters int he Ultimates is to sue the Hulk as a meaner monster; the way to beat superthugs like the Liberators is simply to be badder, tougher superthugs like the Ultimates; and the way to beat Loki the god and his army of monsters is with a bigger, tougher god like Thor and an army of superheroes.) It's unimaginative, pure and simple, and on the one book where that shouldn't be the case.

And now, as I said above, we're headed into yet another of those "villains won, life sucks" futures that Chris Claremont and his X-books successors have been churning out for something like two straight decades at this point. And fromt he solicits, we're in for months more of Mark building new threats up by feeding established threats to them. Galactus is jobbing; Dr. Doom is set to be minimized by this arc and the recent;y-promoted "Masters of Doom" who are apparently the rougher, tougher men who trained Doom. (That rather misses the point of Doctor Doom, not to mention ignoring at least three quite stellar origin stories which leave no room for such "Masters" anywhere.)

It happens to practically every writer after awhile. Ellis I covered in my intro 'graph. Grant Morrison is currently at DC writing two variants of his usual tale of the totalitarian forces of anti-imagination (Darkseid, a wicked psychiatrist who pumps out imitations of Batman and his foes) being set up to lose to icons of 1950s and 1960s pop freestyling moonlighting as avatars of the glorious liberating power of wacky fiction (the 60s Flash and the Japanese meta-kids in Final Crisis, Batman using all his hallucinatory Jack Schiff adventures as an escape hatch of the mind in Batman R.I.P.). And Bendis has been continuing his program of giving us monthly takes on popular movie genres (modern crime thriller, Bruckheimer blockbuster, 50s B-Movie) peppered with indie-comedy dialogue.

Maybe it's time to get off the stage and let these new(er to Marvel) kids, like Fraction, Brubaker, and that Van Lente fellow give us a show. At worst, they'll bomb and you'll get to come back rested to a grateful audience. At best, you can keep doing niche books built around your cemented methods and talents and the big titles get a fresh infusion of untapped energy and underexposed ideas.